Category Archives: osx

phone

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I finally decided to upgrade from my phone from a craptastic nokia to a craptacular motorrola razr.

It does have some nice improvements though. Like useable gprs and bluetooth. I got the osx box syncing to it, and able to get to the internet using it as a bluetooth modem. Took a few hours, but finally found the info I need on the cingular site. Though, the cingular docs on how to connect from osc actually have you firing up a terminal and typing in AT commands at one. Thats pretty awesome. Found a better way elsewhere.

The linux box is next. I got it talking to it via a usb bluetooth dongle, but couldn’t really test anything since I still don’t really get any GPRS connection at home.

Next up is getting the blog to accept phone posts. It seems to work for text, but something goes wonky with images. I really need to update the version of wordpress anyway, since it seems like 1.5.x is now unsupported. I’ve had to hack up the themes and whatnot to make the captcha stuff work, but hopefully thats not an issue in 2.x.

islands in the stream

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I know a couple of people that read this are up on osx audio, and/or icecast and such, so…

I was reading loopers-delight, and one of the posters detailed a setup they used to stream a live set to the net. Not the newest idea in the world, but I’d never really given it much thought as something I could do if I happened to be playing a show in a venue with some wireless access.

Anyone using icecast or similar tech under osx? I’d probably be running the sound into cubase or Ableton Live to record, so would probably need to stream it from there (perhaps after some basic compression, etc). Anyone done anything like that?

All the phasmatodea stuff is freely licensed anyway. I don’t really expect anyone to listen in, but it would be something interesting to try anyway. Geek value.

Though the idea of adding a big pile of software to the already complex setup I have is probably asking for trouble, I might give it a try one day anyway.

If anyone has any experience doing this under linux, I’d be interested in hearing about it as well. I can always bring along the linux laptop as well.

Some info on doing this via icecast someone from the loopers list posted.

software meme

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as per zombiepops and z_kungfu, a quick rundown
of what software I use, by no means complete.

Linux
linux distro
Red Hat, big surprise, RHEL or Fedora/Rawhide depending on what I’m working on. At various points I’ve tried slackware and debian linux. I’ve also tried FreeBSD. But they didn’t really do much for me. I can do the same stuff with Red Hat, and I know it much better. And
linux always seemed to support my hardware better than *bsd.
desktop
GNOME, sorta. I run a pretty minimal config (no nautilus, minimal panel, etc). With ClickToFocus turned off, the way humans use software.
terminal
gnome-terminal I think. whatever I stuck in my panel ages ago. I used to always used a tweak RXVT setup, since I tend to have dozens of terminals open, and it was lighter on mem, but I’ve got tons-o-ram now. All the current gen stuff seems workable, if need be.
editor
vim-enhanced, and emacs. Yup, I’m bi-editorial. vim for doing quick stuff in terminals, email, etc. emacs for
coding, espicially coding python. And vim-enhanced in particular, since normal vim or vi are worthless. I’ll
leave bringing up bare metal broken unices to the admin types.
ide
I guess emacs count. And eclipse when I have to look at java stuff.
mail
mutt for work email, evolution/thunderbird for non work stuff, depending on which one has annoyed me least recently.
im
im at work is for the devil.
browser
firefox
irc
we use irc very heavily at work, I use xchat just because it’s there. Even though it has perhaps the worse server selection screen one could possibly create.
graphics
gimp, gee, big surprise eh…
listening to music
xmms, rhythmbox is overkill for what I need.

osx:
10.4 at the moment
mail
Mail.app or thunderbird, whichever is currently annoying me least. thunderbird at the moment.
browser
firefox
misc
Quicksilver, probably the only app launcher I’ve ever used that actually was faster than a shell in an open terminal.
Desktop Manager, since my brain doesn’t work without virtual desktops.
making music
Cubase SE for recording. It kind of sucks, but I mostly know the ui now.
Reaktor for making weird noises.
Garage Band for fiddling
listening to music
nothing, I don’t have space to store much music on the laptop
fun
MAME
Stella
office
openoffice
editor
stock vim and emacs I got from somewhere
im
iChat

I sometimes use X2vnc and osxvnc/vnc to connect the two. otherwise just ssh/X

If anyone cares, and I missed something, feel free to ask.

gps, riding, etc

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So I’ve spent way to much time trying to do something that should be very simple. Download a track from my gps, and display it on a map.

This proved to be much more frustrating that I expected, and finally gave up trying to do it on os x and just did it with my linux box using gpsbabel (tiger seems to have broken the osx version).

Then I wrote a python script to split the GPX file into individual track files, and then used gmapper to display the results on google maps. gpsvisualizer works too, but the maps don’t look quite as nice.

If anyone knows of an easier way to do that on osx, that actually works, I’d like to know.

So anyway, Saturdays ride:

and the sat view:

os x 10.4 article

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Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Review

Definitely the best review of “Tiger” I’ve seen. Very detailed, and even mostly spin/marketing/zealotry free.

Though, it does certainly dim my expectations of Tiger. “Spotlight” seems to just be the revenge of eazel/ nautilus/ medusa/ fam/ gnome-metadata/ gnome-vfs . (And I suspect, a lot of the same people are involved). Not a bad thing, but definitely not all that the hype promised. Seems like a decent first step though.

Automator sounds quite potentially useful, but hard to say without using it. Any thing that provides easy hooks for extending functionality is always a plus.

Even the shiny marketing hype made Dashboard seem kind of boring and useless, and with more details, it seems even more so. I can only hope there is a scrolling rss reader widget so I can pretend like it’s 1998 again. “Hey dude! It’s not a homepage, it’s a ‘channel’! And it’s on my desktop! Whoa!”.

CoreData should be useful for ISV’s, so hopefully some interesting apps will come out of it.